skykiii
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2018
I kinda went into this in the Nintendo Switch thread but fuck it, I'm feeling stupid today.
Just.... let's go by genre:
RPG = I miss the days when these were as simple as "your party has a fighter, thief, mage and cleric." Back then, if you found a better sword, you equipped it. You didn't have to worry about a million fucking variables like whether the sword added to your shitstain size and gave you .03% advantage in one particular stat you don't even understand the significance of. The payoff was you cared more about the actual journey because you didn't need to care about this micro-managey shit.
Strategy Games = Same deal. There's just too much going on. It's like game designers think something is only "strategic" if there's a fucking spreadsheet involved. In the NES and SNES era, a "Strategy" could be something like "I set fire to this tile to force them to go that way so I can grab their home base."
The irony in both this and RPGs case is that the actual fighting is actually not that complicated. You rarely ever need to think outside the box or activate the little Napoleon inside your head. In fact a lot of them make me feel like I'm doing the same routine every single battle, because all that really matters is the prep I did ahead of time.
Shmups = The entire genre is now Bullet Hell Danmaku stuff. Those are really only ever fun as a novelty, the "whoa look how ridiculous this game is!" kind of thing. Classic shmups were more of an experience, in a lot of ways telling better narratives than even RPGs because of their being the ultimate example of "show don't tell." Rayforce for example tells me a lot more with just its background visuals than any given Final Fantasy game. But in Danmaku, you can't even notice things like the scenery or the music because you're too busy focusing on staying alive. It's to the point where a lot of these games outright don't even bother--like how the various Touhous have the same repeating background over and over because they know you won't even notice.
Fighting Games = First of all, 3D fighting has always sucked, so I'm glad that stuff like Dragon Ball FighterZ exists (in fact I'm not even sure there are any notable 3D fighting games these days--and I mean ones that have actual three-dimensional fighting, not stuff like Smash Bros which looks 3D but entirely plays in 2D).
But there is one trend I fucking hate, and that's how a lot of fighting games have moves that essentially initiate a cutscene where stuff happens to the opponent character, and the player just can do nothing about it. Like whenever Piccolo does that "surround someone with a million little light balls" attack. What I hate about that is... during that cutscene, you're not actually battling, you're watching an animation play out. Nothing you do as either Piccolo or as his unlucky victim actually influences how the scene plays out. It's like the game just stopped to play snippets of a cartoon.
In fighting games, both players should be active participants, all the time. Even Street Fighter II and its "dizzy" mechanic understood this as you could break the dizzy if you mashed fast enough. I give a pass to Mortal Kombat's fatalities though because those are nice enough to only happen when the battle is over.
Horror Games = I'm not sure this genre was ever good. The stories always turn out to be stupid once you get to the end, and any fear you have goes out the window the minute you die and reload a save. That said, if I have to play yet another "hide in the closet until the monster goes away" game, I'm gonna kill a baby pony.
Myst-type games = I made an autistic post about this in the Switch topic, but the fine point is that there's not really a game like Myst anymore... meaning a first-person adventure that both has a story but also a degree of... naturalistic?... puzzle solving. First-person games with a story these days are usually walking simulators, or if they've got puzzles they're an "Escape the Room" game (which is more like a standard adventure game) or else they've explicitly got some sort of gamey gimmick (like the one where you connect light beams everywhere), and either way they're removed from what made Myst fun--that sense that you were doing a sort of archeology, that you weren't "solving a puzzle" so much as you were understanding the world around you.
First-Person Shooters = It's hard to explain but it feels like this genre "slowed down." Even games that are supposed to be deliberate throwbacks feel like they're not as hectic as Doom and its clones used to be. Remember how in those, you could find rooms with hundreds of monsters?
I also don't like the "arena" concept where a room will shut you in and force you to kill monsters who will keep spawning in until the game decides to let you move on. That just seems stupid and arbitrary to me. Part of what made FPSes fun at all is that I had a choice of where and how to fight my battles, such as whether I wanted to shoot the imps in the big hallway or try to save bullets and get them killed by the ceiling trap in the next room over.
Also, stuff like glory kills are fun the first time you see them, but they feel like they just slow the game down.
Autistic Rant Done
Also, obligatory mentions of DLC, games that require internet connections, microtransactions, and all that stuff most people bring up.
Just.... let's go by genre:
RPG = I miss the days when these were as simple as "your party has a fighter, thief, mage and cleric." Back then, if you found a better sword, you equipped it. You didn't have to worry about a million fucking variables like whether the sword added to your shitstain size and gave you .03% advantage in one particular stat you don't even understand the significance of. The payoff was you cared more about the actual journey because you didn't need to care about this micro-managey shit.
Strategy Games = Same deal. There's just too much going on. It's like game designers think something is only "strategic" if there's a fucking spreadsheet involved. In the NES and SNES era, a "Strategy" could be something like "I set fire to this tile to force them to go that way so I can grab their home base."
The irony in both this and RPGs case is that the actual fighting is actually not that complicated. You rarely ever need to think outside the box or activate the little Napoleon inside your head. In fact a lot of them make me feel like I'm doing the same routine every single battle, because all that really matters is the prep I did ahead of time.
Shmups = The entire genre is now Bullet Hell Danmaku stuff. Those are really only ever fun as a novelty, the "whoa look how ridiculous this game is!" kind of thing. Classic shmups were more of an experience, in a lot of ways telling better narratives than even RPGs because of their being the ultimate example of "show don't tell." Rayforce for example tells me a lot more with just its background visuals than any given Final Fantasy game. But in Danmaku, you can't even notice things like the scenery or the music because you're too busy focusing on staying alive. It's to the point where a lot of these games outright don't even bother--like how the various Touhous have the same repeating background over and over because they know you won't even notice.
Fighting Games = First of all, 3D fighting has always sucked, so I'm glad that stuff like Dragon Ball FighterZ exists (in fact I'm not even sure there are any notable 3D fighting games these days--and I mean ones that have actual three-dimensional fighting, not stuff like Smash Bros which looks 3D but entirely plays in 2D).
But there is one trend I fucking hate, and that's how a lot of fighting games have moves that essentially initiate a cutscene where stuff happens to the opponent character, and the player just can do nothing about it. Like whenever Piccolo does that "surround someone with a million little light balls" attack. What I hate about that is... during that cutscene, you're not actually battling, you're watching an animation play out. Nothing you do as either Piccolo or as his unlucky victim actually influences how the scene plays out. It's like the game just stopped to play snippets of a cartoon.
In fighting games, both players should be active participants, all the time. Even Street Fighter II and its "dizzy" mechanic understood this as you could break the dizzy if you mashed fast enough. I give a pass to Mortal Kombat's fatalities though because those are nice enough to only happen when the battle is over.
Horror Games = I'm not sure this genre was ever good. The stories always turn out to be stupid once you get to the end, and any fear you have goes out the window the minute you die and reload a save. That said, if I have to play yet another "hide in the closet until the monster goes away" game, I'm gonna kill a baby pony.
Myst-type games = I made an autistic post about this in the Switch topic, but the fine point is that there's not really a game like Myst anymore... meaning a first-person adventure that both has a story but also a degree of... naturalistic?... puzzle solving. First-person games with a story these days are usually walking simulators, or if they've got puzzles they're an "Escape the Room" game (which is more like a standard adventure game) or else they've explicitly got some sort of gamey gimmick (like the one where you connect light beams everywhere), and either way they're removed from what made Myst fun--that sense that you were doing a sort of archeology, that you weren't "solving a puzzle" so much as you were understanding the world around you.
First-Person Shooters = It's hard to explain but it feels like this genre "slowed down." Even games that are supposed to be deliberate throwbacks feel like they're not as hectic as Doom and its clones used to be. Remember how in those, you could find rooms with hundreds of monsters?
I also don't like the "arena" concept where a room will shut you in and force you to kill monsters who will keep spawning in until the game decides to let you move on. That just seems stupid and arbitrary to me. Part of what made FPSes fun at all is that I had a choice of where and how to fight my battles, such as whether I wanted to shoot the imps in the big hallway or try to save bullets and get them killed by the ceiling trap in the next room over.
Also, stuff like glory kills are fun the first time you see them, but they feel like they just slow the game down.
Autistic Rant Done
Also, obligatory mentions of DLC, games that require internet connections, microtransactions, and all that stuff most people bring up.
